Tag: cognitive science

The purpose of this essay is to display how the Enlightenment’s arête became its harmartia. In other words, it is to show how Modernity’s greatest virtue became its tragic flaw. Its virtue was to separate the Big Three: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This differentiation lead to all the positive aspects of Modern existence (human rights, quality of life, value of personal expression, etc.) that pre-Modernity had not yet made explicit. However, this virtue became a tragic flaw as the Big Three not only moved apart to define their own turf, but also became totally fragmented and disassociated, unable to communicate with one another. The True was defended by objective scientific investigation. It represented a form of knowing that revealed the “It” world of matter in motion. The Beautiful was defended by subjective aesthetic interpretation. It represented a form of knowing that revealed the “I” world of imagination and artistic expression. The Good was defended by “the people,” who together formed the free, intersubjective communities that agreed to protect the inalienable rights of each individual. Its form of knowing represented the “We” world, but its full force has mostly been lost amidst the dust storm kicked up by the battle between the “I” and the “It.” The Good became an inarticulatable middle ground that was supposed to bridge the Beautiful and the True, but its substance seemed to dissolve as the latter two became more and more separated.

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Since language is the medium through which I will attempt to communicate these ideas, it seems fitting that we begin with an explanation of what it means to speak, write, and think under such terms. What is language? Wittgenstein’s early project was to define language in the terms most familiar to the Western tradition, running through Augustine up until Russell. His aim was to show that all philosophy consisted in defining the logical form of sentences. In other words, a certain proposition was thought to be isomorphic to a certain event in the world. When this isomorphism lined up (i.e., when the sentence referred to a real state of affairs in the world) then the sentence was true. This project, of course, rests on the basic assumption that the world is independent of the proposition (and presumably the being who proposes it). This separation between the world and its description (and describer) is what lead the early Wittgenstein to see language as a mirroring of the world’s pre-given state [i.e., as a sharing of its logical form, or an accurate depiction (picturing) of it]. In this sense, a true thought is a thought that logically matches an event that occurs in the world. Philosophy’s job was to analyze these thoughts and sentences to make sure they were expressed in their true logical form. The driving force behind this project was, quite simply, to end all philosophy.

As far as the early Wittgenstein was concerned, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was the solution to every philosophical problem. To get the book published, however, Wittgenstein needed to include an introduction to his work courtesy of the more popular Russell. Russell seemed convinced that Wittgenstein was a genius. Wittgenstein himself, on the other hand, remained skeptical that Russell even understood the book. Nonetheless, the book was published and Wittgenstein left philosophy to pursue a career as an elementary school teacher. Years latter, he came into contact with the Vienna Circle, an influential group of thinkers that had built themselves up around what they took to be the central tenets of the Tractatus: a) we get knowledge only from sensory experience, and b) we can accurately understand that experience only in terms of logical analysis. These maxims are based on the Tractatus’ characterization of language as being composed of simple atomistic statements referring to empirical truths discovered in the world, such as “It is raining,” or “The ground is wet.” Such linguistic atoms can then be built into meaningful molecules of propositional thought, such as the statement: “It is raining outside, therefore the ground is wet.” The building and clarification of such statements is, for the Circle, the goal of all logically sound philosophical discourse. Their goal was to usher in a new age of thought centered around scientific positivism and linguistic analysis. Their biggest target was metaphysics, both theological and existential. For the Circle, any statement about the world that did not make reference to some sensory state given by that world is meaningless (i.e., it is a pseudo-statement). They saw the struggle between metaphysics and positivism as identical to the one between an out-dated, childish religion and a mature, levelheaded science. One ought to face up, the Circle would say, to modern human existence, an existence in which a statement’s meaning referred to its logical accuracy in comparison to the objective world, rather than to its value in relation to some silent and unseen transcendental realm unreachable with analysis. Wittgenstein, however, thought his work had been misunderstood once again.

The whole purpose of the Tractatus, he would try to explain to the Circle, was to show the limits of philosophy and logical analysis. It was not, as the Circle saw it, to make such logical positivism the be all and end all of humanity’s understanding of itself; quite the contrary, it was to show that logic, objectivism, and any breed of universalizing philosophy was necessarily silent on issues concerning genuine human life. In the final pages of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein discusses what his supposedly complete picture of language and its relationship to the world leaves out. He begins by asserting that “all propositions are of equal value” (6.4) In other words, every true statement about the world is just as true as any other true statement about the world. None of them are in any way more important or more valuable than any others. He does so to set the stage for the actual point of the whole book, which is to substantiate the ethical to a sphere beyond anything logical positivism could ever swallow up into its methods of analysis. The ethical is the intuitive sense an existing individual has concerning what is most important about life. Wittgenstein did not think being such an ethical being was optional, as even the members of the Circle made a value judgment by assuming their method of investigation was the most important among all other methods. One cannot live without making ethical judgments. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein thought “the sense of the world must lie outside the world” (6.41). If all propositions are of equal value, and yet “there is a value which is of value” (i.e., a value which is important), then “it must lie outside the world.” It does indeed follow from this that “there can be no ethical propositions” (6.42), which the Circle certainly agreed with. However, Wittgenstein did not mean to say that ethics was therefore meaningless. His claim was that ethics only existed outside the world of objects known to empirical/logical investigation. It was one of those areas of human existence that Wittgenstein chose to remain relatively silent about in the more philosophically oriented Tractatus because he felt it was transcendental and therefore propositionally inexpressible. For Wittgenstein, the question of ethics was always intermingled with the question of religion, as both are equally transcendent in his view. He saw the question of religion as being essentially about personal identity and the notion of an immortal soul. “The temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say, its eternal survival after death, is not only in no way guaranteed, but this assumption in the first place will not do for us what we always tried to make it do. Is a riddle solved by the fact that I survive forever? Is this eternal life not as enigmatic as our present one? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.” (6.4312). In other words, because it seems that our current temporal existence is no more mysterious than any supposed eternal existence would be, we can only suppose that the solution to the problem of life comes from another dimension entirely. This removes the problem of life from the set of logical problems that natural science might attempt to solve. It makes a question of life that positivism cannot even begin to answer because it transcends the world that positivism can make propositional claims about.

“How the world is, is completely indifferent for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world” (6.432). What is “higher” is what is important, what has value, what senses the world from outside the world. The religious, for Wittgenstein, has nothing to do with how the world is, but that it is. “The contemplation of the world from the view of eternity is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling” (6.45). “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer” (6.52). Wittgenstein has already defined the only proper and true use of language as being the logical picturing of the world. He then showed how the problem of life, of its meaning and value, does not fall within the world that can be so pictured. The problem of life is transcendental because its value is not equal to the value of all other logically definable propositions, but is somehow higher. But because it transcends the world, one cannot speak about it and make any sense because all language can refer meaningfully only to facts within the world. Therefore: “The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other-he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy-but it would be the only strictly correct method” (6.53). The other “would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy” because there is something strangely insincere about such a philosophical method. However, if philosophy is to leave behind its metaphysical past and come to terms with the empirical knowledge of science, it must let go of its otherworldly strivings and concentrate on logically mapping language to the facts of the world. This was Wittgenstein’s prescription for what he considered to be the disease of philosophy. He hoped it would also lead those who actually understood it to a solution to the problem of life, as “for an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed” (6.5). In other words, because science and philosophy are silent when it comes to the riddle of life, then there must not be any riddle to begin with. If there were, surely we would be able to answer it using their methods. “If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered” (6.5). If we doubt that we understand the riddle of life, we do so only because we question our own existence. But no question can be posed that cannot be answered, as if the question itself is meaningful then the answer must be implied by its logical structure. That Wittgenstein would have preferred to remain silent about all of this we can infer from the final lines of the Tractatus: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly” (6.54). He goes on to give what some might argue is the central thesis of the entire work: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7).

The Tractatus was motivated by the early Wittgenstein’s desire to lift the ethical, religious, and mystical spheres of life so far above the hands of science and positivist philosophy that none of their methods could ever, even in theory, touch them. He wanted to save the transcendental from those who might try to call it sheer nonsense by removing it from the world of objects that is supposed to make sense. In a way, he was attempting to beat the positivists at their own game by pointing out the meaningless nature of metaphysical statements better than even they could hope to do. However, he did so not to make the purpose of such statements insignificant, but to elevate them beyond the “lower” significance of language (where value comes only by virtue of mirroring a true state of affairs in the world) into the “higher” significance of life (where value is assigned by virtue of what is beautiful). In so doing, he separated language and life in an attempt to preserve the best of both. However, by giving up the possibility of making meaningful statements about life and demanding that we pass over it in silence, Wittgenstein may have done more harm than good. Truth (science, the “It” world) had the persuasive power of language on its side, and so it was much more intellectually convincing than the mere silence offered by the Beautiful (life, “I” world).

Wittgenstein realized his mistake in his later works, most notably the Philosophical Investigations. He totally revamped his theory of language in order to give life back its linguistic sense. Instead of seeing meaning as the correct representation of the world, Wittgenstein realized that language was the very fabric of life itself. It’s meaning did not rest on the empirically verifiable facts of the physical world, but on the use it was put to in the every day conversations of people. If philosophy attempted to take language out of this context in order to find some underlying essence (some logical structure), it would only force the meaning of the words themselves to dissolve into uncertainty and confusion. Meaning is use, to put it quite simply. Our ability to communicate depends as much on the silent context and background of our conversations as it does on the audible (or legible) words we exchange.

This new view of language makes it resemble what complex systems theorists call an emergent property. Our ability to speak, write, and think (in short, our ability to exist as a mind) seems to emerge from our simpler bodily skills into a domain all its own. To say that the mind is an emergent property is to say that it forms its own autopoietic system. In other words, the mind enacts its own world, and this mental world cannot be explained away by reference to lower autopoietic levels (such as the biological or physical levels). If we view the entire kosmos as a nested hierarchy, from matter, to body, to mind, we find that the physiosphere (matter) must make up the lowest rung on the ladder. That is to say, the physical universe composes the most fundamental, and therefore the simplest and most common, level on the hierarchy. Positivist empirical science progressed as quickly and triumphantly as it did precisely because its object of inquiry (the physical world) was the easiest to understand. Emerging out of this lowest level is the biosphere. To emerge means to transcend the prior level while still obeying its basic laws. So the biosphere does something more complex that the physiosphere could ever do on its own, but never does it contradict the laws of matter. Organisms begin to enact their own autopoietic domains, building on the laws of matter to create a higher level of complexity. In so doing, they swallow up the world of the physiosphere, so to speak, forever altering our understanding of what it means for the kosmos to exist as it does. Once life is taken into consideration, no purely reductionistic explanation will ever satisfy us. That organisms, made of nothing but atoms, are somehow “alive” proves that matter is not at all what the materialists would have us believe. And when we begin to consider the emergence of mind, we see that life, too, is not at all what we expected. With the mind we have an even more complex autopoietic system built atop both matter and body. It is this level of mind that gave rise to our linguistic ability, and we can see in the work of the early Wittgenstein that this higher ability was mixed up in a kind of level crossing with the lower, physical level. He believed that language (or the mind) can state (or think of) nothing but what it finds in the material world. This belief was based on the power of the empirical method of investigation, which had proved so valuable when applied to the world of matter. When applied to the mind, however, it begins to show its limits. Sensory empiricism does indeed reveal the hidden laws of the purely physical world, but when we try to explain our use of language based solely on sensory experience we end up turning it into a kind of calculus or measuring device. To say that the only correct use of language is to logically map the facts of the world is to remove from language the notion of meaning that most people find absolutely vital. Language is not merely a tool designed to describe the physical world, though it can be put to this use. Rather, it is the “house of being” as Heidegger put it. It forms the matrix of our cultural worldspace. It brings us into a domain far above the physical world where ideas, values, and meanings take on a life of their own.

In his seminal work, Gödel, Escher, Bach, computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter began to realize that the mind was something very strange indeed. He saw that traditional physical reductionism did not do justice to the bizarre nature of mental abilities, so he began to study how a purely rule-based physical system could give rise to higher-level complexity. “My belief is that the explanations of ‘emergent’ phenomena in our brains- for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will-are based on a kind of strange loop, an interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, while at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. In other words, a self reinforcing ‘resonance’ between different levels” (p. 709). He acknowledges that the mind, to some extent, has operational power over the body and the world. This is a key advancement over prior positivist explanations that negate the mind all together. But he goes on: “This should not be taken as an antireductionist position. It just implies that a reductionistic explanation of mind, in order to be comprehensible, must bring in ‘soft’ concepts such as levels, mappings, and meanings. In principle, I have no doubt that a totally reductionistic but incomprehensible explanation of the brain exists; the problem is how to translate it into a language we ourselves can fathom. Surely we don’t want a description in terms of positions and momenta of particles; we want a description which relates neural activity to ‘signals’ (intermediate-level phenomena)-and which relates signals, in turn, to ‘symbols,’ including the presumed to exist ‘self-symbol'” (p. 709). We see then that, while Hofstadter certainly acknowledges the seeming incommensurability between matter and mind, he is unwilling to suppose that mind in fact transcends and includes matter. Instead, he wants to view the mind as a temporary “strange loop” that emerges from the physical universe much like a whirlpool emerges from a fast moving stream.

His view of emergence is unlike the one I have articulated above, in that it does not suppose that higher levels of emergence swallow up lower levels, making any reductionistic explanation not only incomprehensible, but also impossible. Once mind has emerged, we as the enactors of this new ability can no longer remove ourselves from it in order to explain it by reference to a prior level. The mental realm becomes irreducible as soon as it emerges. Meaning and value become real aspects of the kosmos that cannot be explained away by reference to physical processes, no matter how “strange” and “loopy” those processes are made to seem. Hofstadter believes that a “translation from low-level physical hardware to high-level psychological software” (p. 709) is possible. In other words, he thinks that mental processes can be reduced without remainder (translated) into physical processes. This “level crossing (between matter and mind) is what creates our nearly unanalyzable feelings of self” (p. 709), as our current inability to translate between the two levels accurately has given rise to an inner mental confusion that leads us to believe we have an individual identity. Hofstadter is certainly a naturalist, and as such he is committed to certain dogmatic creeds inherent to the practice of physicalist science. “The subjective feeling of redness comes from the vortex of self-perception in the brain; the objective wavelength is how you see things when you step back, outside the system. Though no one of us will ever be able to step back far enough to see the “big picture,” we shouldn’t forget that it exists. We should remember that physical law is what makes it all happen-way, way down in the neural nooks and crannies which are too remote for us to reach with our high-level introspective probes” (p. 710).

I can only assume that by “physical law” Hofstadter means the causal relations between mass and energy. These relationships are fundamental for him, not only in the sense that they form the foundation of the visible structure of the kosmos, but in the sense that they are all that is really real, all that actually exists. The biosphere and the noosphere are merely temporary disturbances in the dead shuffling around of unintelligent stardust. As wonderful as Hofstadter may feel such disturbances are, and as intricate and genius his supposed explanation of their existence may be, he still, it seems to me, damns them with faint praise. To say that subjective states of consciousness, such as the feeling of redness, are produced by a kind of dizzying confusion of self-perception in the brain is to uphold a kind of naïve realism that no empirical evidence supports. How are we to know what color “really” is? Why do we even ask the question? It seems that as soon as we doubt the self-explanatory nature of the phenomenon itself, we transform our understanding of the world into a kind of disinterested knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Color really is exactly what it seems to be; the feeling of redness needs no further explanation. When a naturalist tries to look deeper into reality to find what color really is, he jumps to the conclusion that some pre-existing material world surrounds us that “we,” to the extent that we can even be said to exist apart from it, must conform to and obey. But again, there is no strictly empirical proof that such a self-abiding objective world even exists. As subjective beings, we are forever limited to the perception of color as it appears. We can certainly invent elaborate intellectual structures to use as instruments to poke and prod the natural world in hopes that it will reveal its underlying secrets, but such structures cannot then be seen as more real than the phenomenon itself. The structures were invented after the fact of the experience itself. Nowhere in the immediate sensation of color is such a structure found. Rather, the structure is a construction of an overly doubtful mind.

The source of this doubting mind runs deep into the tradition of Western philosophy, finding its most notable articulation in the work of Descartes. Being, as he was, divided between both a religious and scientific outlook, unable to give up one or the other, Descartes was forced to separate the two into their own dimensions of existence. The mental world of imagination and ideas, of identity and meaning, he gave to God and the soul. The physical world of matter and energy, of purely mechanical process, he gave to science and technology. Subject and object, mind and matter, were for centuries afterward seen as two incompatible substances that could never be brought back together. Much like the early Wittgenstein, Descartes wanted to preserve the merits of religion along with the merits of science by separating the domains wherein each was valid. This predictably (as we have already seen with Wittgenstein) lead to an even bigger confusion. Highly religious idealists like Bishop Berkeley took the view that mind was all there was, as we have no way to prove that the physical world is anything but our own subjective projection. More worldly empiricists like Locke refuted Berkeley’s idealism by dividing the world of experience into primary and secondary qualities. The primary qualities of mass, motion, shape, and number were deemed part of the real, objective physical universe. Secondary qualities like color, temperature, odor, and taste were deemed part of an illusory, subjective domain. In this spirit, one philosopher, Samuel Johnson, is said to have proven Berkeley’s subjectivism wrong by kicking a large boulder and saying, “I refute it thus!” Hofstadter belongs to this empiricist tradition, which was the clearest benefactor of the Enlightenment’s separation of the Big Three due to the easily recognizable and commonsense strength of such arguments. That the true reality was an objective and material universe made of measurable quantities without any subjective qualities seemed the most reasonable of assumptions. After all, no one ever saw anything like an idea with his or her eyes; all that was immediately visible was the physical world. This scientific paradigm is what lead the Big Three to become so distanced from one another. The Beautiful, the world of the individual imagination where one appreciated the immediate aesthetic wonderment offered by nature and artistic creation, and where one was awed by the mystery of existence itself, became a sort of subjective, solipsistic cage with no practical value. This was so because the True, the world of objective and empirical scientific fact, saw no reason why such an inner life should even exist. The universe, from this positivist perspective, was totally explainable by reference to the external interactions of material surfaces. This lead to the philosophy of logical analysis, to behaviorism, to sociobiology-in short: to reductionism in all its many forms. Even the new sciences of complexity do not escape the reductive attitude. As we see in Hofstadter, the universe is still thought of as a giant machine that, although capable of some pretty exciting quasi-emergent dance maneuvers that give rise to higher levels of complexity, is nevertheless running irreversibly downward toward disorder and chaos with no greater purpose or goal in mind. This is Hofstadter’s “big picture.” The fact that human beings exist with feelings and intelligence is a kind of cosmic fluke, even a joke. Our existence is highly unstable, as the universe we call home is one of cruel, causal necessity where any sense of higher meaning or purpose is but the sentimental dream of an insignificant, frightened, and confused little child left for dead upon a chunk of rock floating through empty, meaningless space.

Let me sum up in an attempt to be clearer. Hofstadter “defines the mind as the emergence of a neural feedback loop within the brain. It is this peculiar loop that allows a stream of cognitive symbols to twist back on itself, so creating the self-awareness and self-integration that constitute an ‘I'” (Booklist review of I Am a Strange Loop). But this “I” is not the “I” we feel ourselves to be, the identity that we believe gives us free will and the ability to choose to do the Good, etc. “I don’t see any room in this complex world for my will to be ‘free'” (p. 340). Hofstadter’s understanding of emergence in terms of “feedback loops” would not have sat well with Francisco Varela, whose notion of autopoiesis [introduced in collusion with Maturana in 1979 (which incidentally was the same year GEB was published) in Principles of Biological Autonomy] was an attempt to do away with the kind of framework that required inputs and outputs (such as the notion of feedback loops). “One of the central intentions of the study of autopoiesis and organizational closure is to describe a system with no inputs or outputs (which embody their control or constraints) and to emphasize their autonomous constitutions” (p. 56). If we view consciousness as a feedback loop, it becomes somewhat of a one-way street, not in the sense that higher level top-down influences cannot affect lower level properties of a system, but in the sense that a feedback loop “requires and implies an external source of reference, which is completely absent in organizational closure” (p. 56). To further clarify the concept of organizational closure: “A system is organizationally closed if all its possible states of activity must always lead to or generate further activity within itself” (Self Producing Systems by John Mingers, p. 31). This implies, in the case of the nervous system, that all neural activity effects, and is effected by, other neurons. “Even the motor and sensor neurons are no exception; they do not ‘open’ the nervous system to its environment. The motor neurons trigger sensor neurons through the activity they initiate, and sensor neurons are thereby internally stimulated.” Because the mind (or consciousness) is its own autopoietic system with its own enacted domain and organizational closure, to refer to it as a collection of “neural feedback loops” is to miss the essential meaning of the emergence of mind. To further explain the concept of autopoiesis, we can compare it to its opposite: allopoiesis. An allopoieic system is much like a car factory. It uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) that is something other than itself. An autopoietic system, on the other hand, uses raw materials to generate its own organizational structure. The various components of, say, a eukaryotic cell (mitochondria, cell membrane, ribosomes, nucleus, etc.) work to keep the cell alive by constantly re-creating themselves. So an autopoietic system is an open system with operational closure. That means while it uses outside material to build its structure (in the case of a cell, the various molecules and nutrients that keep it alive), making it an open system, it then uses those materials to enact a closed organizational space within a membrane where cell components can reproduce themselves. This notion of openness, however, when applied to the mind and nervous system, should not be mistaken for allowing some kind of sensory input into the system. To have a distinguishable sensory input, mental states would have to arise in a linear fashion: first a sensation, followed by a perception, finalized with a motor response. In the case of an actual mind, however, neural activity is organizationally closed, which means that it is not a blank slate upon which sensory data might write itself. The nature of any sensory data would be lost due to the nervous system’s pre-existing state always being a constant codependency between sense and response (sensory data and motor coordination). In other words, we could just as well reverse the sequence and say that perception is brought about by a kinesthetic change in the body, which then leads to the sensation of an environment. This reversal of the linear sequence does nothing but show how untenable the original sensation-perception-motor response sequence was. If a linear system with inputs and outputs be supposed, then both of these alternatives are equally possible and yet contradictory. “It may appear that the structure of an autopoietic system changes in relation to, or in response to, changes in its environment. But for an observer to see such changes in the environment as an input and the structural change as an output is to mischaracterize the system as allopoietic, since the changes will, actually, have been devoted to maintaining autopoiesis” (p. 33). In other words, while it may appear to an external observer that a certain system, say the brain, reacts to certain sensory inputs by changing its structure (an output), the reality is that the system itself, if autopoietic, has only been triggered to accommodate the environmental conditions. It is triggered and not controlled by the environment because the system’s response depends on its own organization, which, again, is closed and self-determining. In this way, no sensory input could ever be linked up with a motor output in a discrete and unambiguous way. The brain is not an information-processor where such linear, causal connections could be made.

Whenever a new idea as exciting as emergence pops onto the scene, we should expect that it will be stretched to the point of abuse and misunderstanding by the varying theorists and diverse disciplines that attempt to squeeze it into their field of inquiry in order to explain some heretofore incomprehensible phenomenon. Naturalists such as Hofstadter have committed themselves to the notion of a pre-existing world, “an external source of reference,” whereas enactivists like Varela have tossed aside such assumptions in favor of the more intuitively pleasing framework that integrates the “I” world and the “It” world without doing epistemological violence to either perspective by reducing it to the other. Varela’s universe is one of groundlessness, as his Buddhist background has given him access to an epistemological tradition that need not rest upon a stable, external world of material objects. Such a universe makes most Westerners uneasy, especially those of a naturalist bent, as if there is no ground to reality it is essentially a series of veils behind veils behind veils amounting in the end to pure (yet radiant) emptiness. There is, in such a universe, no final truth, no ultimate ground, and the scientist is therefore forced to give up his quest to discover and analyze it so as to announce to the world that all questions have been answered and all mysteries laid bare.

Varela sees the “I” differently than Hofstadter. “In my epistemology, the virtual self is evident because it provides a surface for interaction, but it’s not evident the moment you try to locate it. It’s completely delocalized” (The Third Culture by John Brockman, Ch. 12). This seems nearly identical to Hofstadter’s description, but the essential difference is that Varela’s “I,” or self, provides a “surface for interaction.” This surface is the hypothetical line drawn around the mind’s organizational closure. For Varela, the virtual self “produces its own boundary. It doesn’t require an external agent to notice it, to say ‘I’m here.’ It bootstraps itself out of a soup of chemistry and physics” (Ch. 12). This, again, sounds very similar to Hofstadter, but the essential difference is that Varela does not make use of the physical world as an external support structure for such bootstrapping. For him, emergent phenomena display a “screwy logic where the snake bites its own tale and you can’t discern a beginning.” This is unlike Hofstadter’s formulation where the snake is forced to balance itself upon the material world, supported as it were by purely physical law. It wobbles, unstably so at first, into the complex dance that supports its higher level functioning, though all along the dance floor remains the foundation of the whole operation. Again, for Varela “the nervous system is not an information-processing system, because, by definition, information-processing systems need clear inputs. The nervous system has internal, or operational, closure. We must deconstruct the notion that the brain is processing information and making a representation of the world.” In other words, we must see the mind as defining a new domain of existence that supercedes the domain of physics (and biology, for that matter). The mind transcends and includes the physical world, and so if we were going to attempt to describe how such an emergence was possible, it would be better to start from mind and work our way down. This is the exact opposite of Hofstadter’s approach. He sees the world as an object to be known, whereas for Varela “knowledge coevolves with the knower and [has nothing to do with] an outside, objective representation.” He goes on to attack the notion that physics is somehow fundamental to reality: “A physicist will say that we’re made of atoms. Such statements, while true, are irrelevant. There is a reality of life and death, which affects us directly and is on a different level from the (physicist’s) abstractions. We have to abandon the enormous deadweight of the materialism of the Western tradition and turn to a more planetary way of thinking.”

So we see, then, that with the help of Wittgenstein, language was raised into a new, emergent domain with organizational closure. Its use was its meaning, and its meaning composed the very being of the lifeworld. Reducing or translating its symbols into atomic facts that mirror the state of the physical world could not explain the mental worldspace enacted therein. Hofstadter was not totally ignorant of this fact, as he understood the necessity of making reference to the softer domains of psychological phenomena in order to explain how consciousness works in a believable, understandable, and humanly acceptable way. However, because he could not give up his prized belief in the primacy of the physical universe, his descriptions remained reductive by not offering the kind of organizational closure that Varela saw as crucial for understanding the higher and more complex qualities that emerge in the biological and mental spheres of reality. To understand what it is for life to have a meaning, we cannot look down the nested hierarchy of being to mass and energy for an explanation. The “I” world of mental phenomena is not merely a feedback loop propped up by an accidental conglomeration of dumb particles; it is an emergent domain whose existence was enfolded in and implied by the physical universe from the very beginning. Matter is not the blind and unintelligent substance positivist science would have us believe. Rather, it is the very seed of life and consciousness itself. Matter, if you will excuse the clumsiness of the metaphor, wanted to come alive; and further, life wanted to become conscious. The kosmos is striving toward something and has an undeniable telos built into its very structure and substance. Indeed, it is even willing to repeatedly transcend itself, a rebirth of sorts, into ever higher and more complex emergent domains.

To return once again to the Big Three, we can see that an integration of the “I” world of consciousness and the “It” world of mass and energy is necessary before any legitimate progress in the “We” world of ethics is possible. If no bridge between the “I” and “It” is built, the “We” becomes seemingly non-existent. The “I” world exists only to myself; the “It” world exists to no one in particular, but rather is the environment within which I and all other I’s are forced to conform and adapt. The only ethics possible in this situation, if we are to call them ethics at all, would arise out of my own self-interest. Sociobiology is the result of the “We” world being so confused and up for grabs. Science had to lay claim to the territory, as it is an inherently expansive epistemology that seeks to explain all possible domains of existence regardless of their sanctity. Ethics, which exists genuinely only at the level of mind (which positivist science rejects altogether), was thereby reduced to the blind biological instincts of self-preservation. This reduction is a totally disaster, not only philosophically, but practically, as it opens up the possibility that the Good includes genocide and eugenics. Such ideas are intuitively evil to almost anyone who contemplates them; however, a purely positivist science cannot admit of such intuitions. They are too subjective to be taken seriously. This is a moral catastrophe.